I was trying to get the non-ascii characters from my property file to render correctly in my jsp file. My original property file was encoded using UTF-8 with the spanish translations for my application. While rendering the page, I was getting a few garbled text instead of pulling the proper spanish text from the property file. Here is the simple fix that I came across after researching on it for the whole day.

1. Made a copy of my original property file, messages_es.properties, and named it messages_es.original.properties
2. Run the file, messages_es.original.properties, through native2ascii to convert the characters to its unicode escape form. Here is the command line for this: native2ascii -encoding UTF-8 ages_es.original.properties messages_es.properties